TV Review - Days of Our Lives: A Very Salem Christmas

The soap opera Days of Our Lives premiered on NBC in November 1965. It is currently in its 57th season. It focuses on a group of families living in the fictional town of Salem, Illinois. It has had a lot of crazy story lines over the decades. The series has also done a lot of ground-breaking things, including a demonic possession and alien twins from outer space. There's also been a lot of progressive and down-to-Earth stuff like the first ever same-sex male wedding on daytime television. The characters of Will Horton and Sonny Kiriakis were married on screen in 2014, marking the first ever, same-sex male wedding on a soap opera. Unfortunately, the series got rid of Will and Sonny in September 2020 by making their characters leave Salem and move to Phoenix, Arizona.

A year later in September, Will and Sonny was brought back, not for the main series, but for a spin-off on Peacock, which is NBC's streaming service. That spin-off was called Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem (2021). It was a fun, Labor Day adventure that utilized most of the main characters from the NBC series into a world-hopping story of intrigue. Even though the main series most likely won't ever reference the events in the spin-off, it was a new story that actually occurred in the lives of those characters. This special movie is just a "what if" scenario that Will and Sonny invent for those main characters from the NBC series. What happens in this special is technically not real. Even if it were real, a lot of what happens here is rehashing of things that even casual fans of Days of Our Lives are fully aware.

Zach Tinker (The Young and the Restless and Law & Order: True Crime) stars as Sonny Kiriakis, a business owner who lives with his husband in Phoenix with their daughter. It's Christmas Eve and Sonny is excited to start wrapping gifts to put under the Christmas tree. He wants to celebrate with his husband, but things change when again they're interrupted by his husband's work assignment. In Beyond Salem, Sonny's life was interrupted by his husband's work assignment and interrupted potentially for the worst. Here, the interruption happens potentially for the better, but yet it still interrupts their lives.

Chandler Massey is a three-time Emmy winner for playing Will Horton. Massey reprises that role here. Will is the husband to Sonny. He works as a writer, mainly for a newspaper in Phoenix, but the work assignment in Beyond Salem is now being adapted into a miniseries for an unnamed streaming service. Will is given a deadline to write a Christmas special for that streaming service, but Will hasn't even started it yet, and it's due tonight. Sonny has to then help Will write this Christmas special before the end of the night. What we see is basically what Will and Sonny have written.

This setup and framing device feels forced to try to involve Will and Sonny in this whole thing, which they otherwise wouldn't be because they don't live in Salem. Yet, anecdotally Will and Sonny were the most popular story line in Beyond Salem, so not having them here probably would have disappointed a large chuck of the fans. Yet, this framing device only separates Will and Sonny from the rest of the cast, preventing them from interacting with those other characters, which would've been more fun. It was also unnecessary. If this whole thing is mainly a "what if" scenario, then make the whole thing a "what if" scenario and just have Will and Sonny back in Salem, instead of isolated in Phoenix.

Written by Ron Carlivati, the "what if" scenario is basically the plot of Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square (2020) on Netflix, which won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. This isn't inherently a problem. That Dolly Parton premise wasn't wholly original either. Mary Poppins Returns (2018) had a similar premise. That premise is basically a wealthy person, a Scrooge-like individual, evicting people and business owners from a town square. Those evicted people and owners have to come up with the money in order to save themselves.

In this case and in the case of the Dolly Parton movie, that wealthy person is a woman. Here, it's Paulina Price, played by Jackée Harry (227 and Sister Sister). Paulina is comparable to Scrooge, but she's also akin to Cruella de Vil. This is also possibly a subtle reference to the fact that Days of Our Lives for its 57th season is revisiting its Devil possession story line. It allows for the return for what was again one of the most popular aspects of Beyond Salem and that's a drag queen show. There's also an infusion of other sexy surprises where this movie utilizes the soap opera's bevy of beautiful men, including Eric Martsolf, Paul Telfer and Dan Feuerriegel who gives new meaning to the term "sexy Santa."

Otherwise, a lot of the narrative was rehashing of things we already knew. There's a revelation where Sami Brady, played by Alison Sweeney, learns that Sydney is her daughter, a daughter that Nicole Walker, played by Arianne Zucker, stole. This revelation happened on the series over a decade ago, so having it happen here in this movie is a rehash. There's another rehash in the love triangle, which has Kristen DiMera, played by Eileen Davidson, bounce between John Black, played by Drake Hogestyn, and Brady Black, played by Eric Martsolf. In fact, Paulina trying to evict people from the town square was the story line that brought Jackée Harry to the NBC series in the first place, so this whole thing is basically rehashing old stories or even recent stories.

The only new potential was the scenes between Paul Telfer who plays Xander Kiriakis and Greg Rikaart who plays Leo Stark. Back in 2019, the NBC series teased the possibility of Xander and Leo hooking up or them literally having sex. Here, Carlivati brings those two characters back together, but even this movie doesn't go as far as fans probably would have wanted. Xander and Leo should have become lovers in this movie. Instead we get a lot of references to Hugh Grant and Love Actually (2003), as well as a couple references to Die Hard (1988), which is available to watch on Peacock, so at least there's some nice synergy there.

Rated TV-14.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 18 mins.

Available on Peacock Premium.